The balance of power remains unchanged

After an embarrassment at his first EU summit in Gothenburg in 2001, President George W. Bush, a man with a famously short fuse and limited attention-span, must have been looking forward with trepidation to his 22 February round table with all 25 EU leaders, writes Stewart Fleming

European Voice

2/23/05, 5:00 PM CET

Updated 4/12/14, 11:08 AM CET

But according to a former top state department official, who served in the Reagan administration and under the president’s father, the fact that Dubya came to Europe at all, on what was for Americans a holiday weekend, is further evidence of the seriousness with which Washington is now engaging with what Bush called in his speech at the Concert Noble “the peoples of Europe”.

French President Jacques Chirac was more succinct. Bush had come to Brussels because the US was now making a more “realistic” assessment of the European Union’s “capacity and weight” in the world.

But after the US president departed, diplomats were still left wondering just how much the topography of global politics had really changed as a result of the intense transatlantic diplomatic dialogue of the past three weeks.

Has the president who proclaimed in his post 9/11 ‘National Security Strategy of the United States of America’ the objective of making his homeland forever into an unchallengable, military and economic superpower, now recanted and embraced multilateralism and, if so, why?

And has the born-again Christian who unilaterally suspended the Geneva conventions on the treatment of prisoners and whose officials have been sending human beings abroad to be tortured by allies, the policy of so-called “extraordinary rendition”, now seen the light?

“Everybody wants to take advantage of Bush’s initiative but we are now waiting to see whether it is worth a row of beans,” says a senior EU foreign policy expert.

The past month has seen the most intensive transatlantic diplomacy by this, or perhaps any, recent American administration. From the meeting of the Group of Seven (G7) finance ministers in London at the beginning of February, through the tour of European capitals by Condoleezza Rice, the new secretary of state, the participation by Donald Rumsfeld, the old (and new) secretary of defence to the security conference in Munich and now the Bush visit to Brussels, there has been no shortage of opportunities to exchange views. But so far EU diplomats do not detect any major shifts in US policy apart from the new level of engagement with Europe itself.

“The meetings are the message,” another EU diplomat remarked on Tuesday after hearing the Bush speech. The president had come to Brussels, to talk to the European Union itself, the European Commission and the European Council. This clearly marked an end to the “divide and rule” approach of his first term of dealing with each EU member separately.

As for substance, if by that we mean evidence of shifts in policy positions by the US, then there is no great disappointment. That is because there were no great expectations. One EU official noted for example that Bush’s presentation at the Concert Noble had been long on demands for change by the Palestinians and, unsurprisingly, light on pressure on Israel. “Bush’s comment about freezing Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank implies no withdrawals from any of the illegal settlements that are already there,” he pointed out.

“We talked a lot about development policy, especially in Africa,” says an official who attended the G7 meeting in London, “but we did not make any progress towards agreeing on new initiatives to finance it.” As for the wider issue of how to tackle the looming threat of severe global economic instability, nothing changed, he said. Positions are still entrenched and unbridgeable.

More worrying perhaps to European antennae, was the faint, but not surprising, sound of dissonance between Rice and Rumsfeld.

While Rice was spreading the message of a new era in transatlantic relations in friendly sessions with the likes of Jacques Chirac, Rumsfeld was still muttering darkly in Munich about “coalitions of the willing”, code for unilateralism.

In Munich it was German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder who defined most precisely the challenge facing America if it really wants to improve transatlantic relations. In a seminal speech which had to be read for him because he was ill, Schröder insisted that the transatlantic relationship “must adapt to new circumstances… the current form of the dialogue between the European Union and the United States does justice neither to the Union’s growing importance nor to the new demands on transatlantic co-operation”.

In Brussels this week, after his dinner with Bush, Chirac made clear that he wholeheartedly supported Schröder’s position, another sign of the depth of Franco-German security policy co-ordination and one which will not be missed by the British.

“No country in the world can successfully tackle the new international challenges on its own,” Schröder said. Accepting and adjusting to this reality, recognising that the Cold War days when the US could rely on the Europeans to fall in line behind its leadership are well and truly over, is the biggest challenge Washington faces.

Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King’s College London, wrote this week that “the rebalancing of the transatlantic relationship is taking place… because of America’s weakness”. Even loyal Republicans in Washington are admitting, through gritted teeth, that the US is overstretched militarily. America’s dependence on foreign oil and foreign capital and its gargantuan twin budget and current account deficits are also evidence of weakness, reflected again this week in renewed nervousness about the value of the dollar. Michael Lind, senior fellow at the Washington-based New America Foundation and one of America’s most respected foreign policy analysts says: “The bullying approach of the Bush administration has ensured that the US will not be invited to take part in designing the international architecture of Europe and Asia in the 21st century.”

So in truth, the answer to the question of why Bush was in Europe this week, however painful to Washington’s neo-conservative ideologues, is that despite his characteristic braggadocio in public, he could not afford not to be. The same will be true for his successor, even if it is his more conservative brother Jeb Bush.

Stewart Fleming is a freelance journalist based in Brussels and a former US editor of the Financial Times.